Plush Turtles from Chino
by ayelles
Summary: Set after the season finale. "He bought her a stuffed pink turtle when they found out the baby was a girl." One-shot. Please R&R!


**For some reason, writer's block over college essays but not over the O.C.**

He puts down the phone and leans again the kitchen sink. There are dirty dishes in there, no one bothered to wash the dinner dishes. One of them would do the morning dishes and that automatically meant that you washed the dishes that were already in the sink. Her mother would die if she knew about that system.

How can you stand all those dirty dishes just sitting there? Waiting for cockroaches and mice to attack it?

It seemed like most of the time, he cared more about what her mother thought than she did. Oh wait, it had always been like that.

She never cared that her jeans were dirty or torn. It was he who told her that they didn't look too good on her. And of course, she fixed them up and washed them well because of what he said- and not what her mother yelled at her.

He had some sort of connection with her. The kind they never really wanted to let go of.

She was sitting on their bed now, behind the mock division of their home. It was a tiny studio apartment, no walls separating the kitchen from the living room from the dining room from the bedroom. But then again, all those rooms wouldn't fit in the tiny space. They got by with a little table with little stools, a couch they found at a garage sale and the bed.

The bed was a gift from some friends of her brother's. They remembered Ryan and felt sorry for Theresa.

She hated the way they felt sorry for her. She hated when they judged her at all. The looks Jenna and Vivian and Carmen gave her when she walked by. The whispers of the old shop keeper on the corner of 24th and Pumpkin.

You see that one, she got herself pregnant. She went all the way to Newport and got pregnant. But she had to hide it so she got engaged to the other boy.

Ryan could very easily go around town and smack whoever insulted her. He wanted to. No one treated his friends like that. Especially not his best friend, the one that carried his child.

Instead, Ryan stopped going to that store and headed to the K-Mart on the other side of town. There he bought Theresa her lotion and socks and Big Red gum. It seemed like a long way to go to buy the trivial objects, but Ryan had his pride. Pride that would feel better if he could knock some decency into the gossipy neighbors that congregated at the corner shop. Pride that sent him to K-Mart.

That was where he bought her a stuffed pink turtle when they found out the baby was a girl.

She was lying on the bed now, her feet propped up on a pillow. A side effect of pregnancy was the swelling of her feet. They were enormous and she hated them. So she covered them in socks during the day and sweet smelling lotions at night.

He knew the scents she wore by heart. Raspberry everything. Rose on special occasions.

If he didn't know any better, he would have figured that she liked those scents because of the colors they came in. Dark pink. Pink. Red. The same color as her favorite shoes- strappy sandals from Payless. And the same color as the sweater her grandmother knitted for her ages ago.

That was also the same reason she held on to the stuffed pink turtle all the time, he guessed. Pink things soothed her. The fake pink orchids on the table by her side of the bed, next to the stuffed turtle, said everything.

_I bet you this turtle will be our baby's Captain Oats_.

It took him a while to explain Captain Oats to Theresa. She didn't quite understand it, the same way she could barely understand his new friends. Come on, Seth was just weird.

She listened to all his worries about Seth's disappearance though. Though she didn't tell him, he knew that she lit candles in church praying for the safe return of Seth. Apparently, her prayers were more effective than Ryan's and the Cohens'. A week after Ryan told her about it, seven candles later, Seth and his boat were found on Catalina Island.

Ryan though he mentioned Captain Oats beforehand, but judging from Theresa's bewildered look at the mention of his name, he never had.

He looked at her and explained the childhood friend. The sentimental value that Captain Oats had.

She smiled slightly and confessed that Dree was like that for her. Dree, the now pathetic looking stuffed dog, still lay in a box somewhere. He had been trapped in the box ever since Theresa moved in with Ryan in the little studio apartment.

He was Theresa's first friend, the one that she talked to for hours when Ryan first disappeared.

She looked over at him for a moment, trying to remember if she ever noticed his connection with a particular toy. The answer was no. He never had had a toy like Captain Oats or Dree. The toy that wasn't an inanimate object but instead a friend.

"You never had toys did you?" She thought out loud one day.

He nodded.

She picked up the plush turtle and threw it at him. That toy wasn't for the baby anymore, it was for Ryan. Something to hold onto when he was afraid, which she knew he was. Something to hug when she was at work. Something that would remind him of her and the baby when he went back to Newport.

She knew he would. He'd go back to Newport and forget all about Chino. Unless, of course, he had the plush turtle hugging him at night. Taking him back to where he belongs.


End file.
